José ‘Girah’ Macedo Turns $30 Into $2 Million

An incredible rags to riches story which bares resemblance to Durrrr’s online poker journey has been circulating online for a while.

An unknown member on the 2+2 forum posted his personal story of how he went about winning around $2 million after initially making a deposit of $30 at the Betfair poker room. When it was first posted on the forum, the thread generated more then 50 pages of replies, with a lot of 2+2ers being non-believers, because the story simply sounded way too awesome to be true.

Now it seems that any doubts regarding the authenticity of the story have been put to rest, with the 18 year-old Portuguese player by the name of José Macedo stepping forward to do an interview with the site pokerstatic.com.

In the interview, José Macedo reveals that he was raised solely by his mother following the death of his father at 4 years-old. When he was 16, it became apparent that José was inspired by the success of Tom “Durrr” Dwan, and he was determined to learn everything he could about poker to turn a small amount of money into something significant. His dream was to make enough from poker to buy a house in Hawaii for his mother and friends.

Eventually, his mum gave him $30 to deposit at Betfair Poker where he started playing at the 1c/2c cash tables. In one month, he turned that initial deposit into $2,500.

“At this point, I was playing 100NL and the games were starting to get tougher. I noticed that the best players at my tables were playing a looser style than me (I was really tight, like 15/13). Slowly I began to open up my game and that got me to think more deeply about hands. This eased my transition into HU, where I would end up playing most of my volume.” Macedo said.

Interestingly, José didn’t even know about poker tracking software like Hold’em Manager when he first starting playing online poker. Through determination and the effort put into improving his game, Macedo was able to move up in limits taking shots at $5/$10 NL within a fairly short period of time.

At the $1000 NL level the tougher player pool gave him even more motivation to fix any leaks in his game and he sought out the help from high stakes coaches, including the likes of Dan “jungleman12″ Cates, apparently paying as much as $3000 an hour for some coaches. This enabled him to take shots at $25/$50 and $50/$100 NL.

Now wIth the confirmation that José Macedo really does exist this truly great poker story is an inspiration for all up and coming poker players around the globe, proving that with discipline and hard work anything can happen.